militant atheist hookah-smoking party at my college campus, you’re all invited

The more you pursue a higher education, the more likely you are to abandon your faith — at least that’s what conventional wisdom holds.

“Actually we’ve just been wrong about this for quite a while,” said Mark D. Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of a new study that suggests students who attend and graduate from college are more likely than others to hold on to their faith.

It’s not that colleges necessarily encourage faith, he said, but for all the talk about how intellectuals are out to destroy students’ relationships to their religions and God, the main obstacles to such relationships have to do with maturing and how young people spend their time. “Some kids were bound to lose [their faith] anyway and they do,” Regnerus said. But the evidence suggests that college isn’t responsible.

In fact, it found young adults who didn’t attend college more likely to give up on the whole religion business (76 percent of the non-college group reported a decline in attending religious services, compared to 59 percent of college students). There are obviously a lot of reasons for this difference other than that college somehow magically keeps people religious, but at least it sort of disproves the theory that crazy liberal universities turn everybody into secular humanists as well.

Although unfortunatley this fact — “those who have smoked pot experience more of a drop” in religous attendance — is totally going to get picked up and run with by social conservatives and anti-drug crusaders as some sort of illogical cause-and-effect scenario. Those should be some fun PSAs.

(Says Chad Orzel, “Clearly, militant atheists need to spend less time on education, and more time on the critical task of getting college students stoned and laid. Woo!”)